How to download a large file with the iPhone SDK and avoid memory usage issues? - iphone

Question

I'm using the NSURLConnection class to download a large file in my iPhone application, but it crashes every so often because it's using too much memory. I'm doing the usual NSURLConnection usage, to append the received data to a NSMutableData object.
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data {
[self.fileData appendData:data];
}
Then after I finish downloading the whole file, I save it to a local temporary file, and read it as a mapped file like this:
- (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection {
// save the downloaded data into a temporary file
NSString *tempPath = NSTemporaryDirectory();
NSString *tempFile = [tempPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:#"temp.pdf"];
[self.fileData writeToFile:tempFile atomically:YES];
NSData *mappedData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfMappedFile:tempFile];
NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL URLWithString:#"http://mydomain.com"];
[webView loadData:mappedData MIMEType:#"application/pdf" textEncodingName:#"UTF-8" baseURL:baseURL];
}
What can I improve here to avoid these memory usage problems?

Answer 1

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveResponse:(NSURLResponse*)response {
filename = [[NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:save_name]; // filename is in .h file
[[NSFileManager defaultManager] createFileAtPath:filename contents:nil attributes:nil];
file =
[[NSFileHandle fileHandleForUpdatingAtPath:filename] retain];// file is in .h
//if (file) {
//
// [file seekToEndOfFile];
// }
}
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSD
ata *)data {
if (file) {
[file seekToEndOfFile];
} [file writeData:data];
}
- (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection*)connection {
[file closeFile];
}

Answer 2

If it's that large, why not write it to the file as it comes in, rather than keeping it in an NSData object?

Answer 3

i'm using
- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data
{
filename = [[NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:save_name];
NSFileHandle *file1 = [NSFileHandle fileHandleForUpdatingAtPath: filename];
[file1 writeData: data];
[file1 closeFile];
}